TRACKS autism

The site and its processes

TRACKS autism is an independent local charity and early years centre, based in Stevenage UK, for children with autism and related conditions. They also offer respite care for children's family and carers during school holidays.

The brief was a tough one because the site is aimed at a wide range of potential visitors. It had to cater for the carers and parents of children with autism and we were aware that these visitors may also be on the autistic spectrum. To this end the site had to clear and use muted colours.The other target visitors are professionals, potential donors and the press.

The site also had to be responsive and it was very important that visitors did not have to re-learn how to use the site when moving between devices. To do this we kept the design of the menu exactly the same on all devices.

The menu can be shown or hidden on all screen widths - again this ensures that its behaviour is identical on all devices. We also opted to "push" the content out of the way when the menu is revealed rather than obscure the content area. We really liked the way this worked because nothing is hidden and all the content is visible at all times and the full functionality of the site is always available.

Add-ons and EE special sauce

The site was built around the Structure plugin however we had to write a custom plugin which pulled the data from Structure to build the main menu.

We also built another custom plugin to pull rows at random from an EE grid to automate the process of showing some of the content.